1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a curing vessel in a gel-coated seed processing device, in which the surface of each gel-coated seed coated by a polymeric gel is immersed into a curing agent, and thereafter the curing agent coated thereon is washed off.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Conventionally, it has been a very common process to sow seeds without coating them. However, there have also been seeds whose external surface are coated for the protection purpose.
In fact, there have been developed coated seeds heretofore in which the seeds are coated by powder agent or the like, but its principal object has been to enable an easy sowing of seeds by a sowing machine or the like, whereby sowing of already germinating seeds could not be done by currently used sowing machines.
The coating apparatus of this kind generally adopts a method in which an adhesive agent called "binder" is sprayed onto the surface of seeds and thereafter a coating agent is attached thereto by a rotary drum or the like to form a coating layer therearound by relatively a large scale of processing facility, so that although this is suitable for processing a large quantity of seeds, it is not appropriate for a small scale of process proceeded in a private farmer house or the like.
Alternatively, there have also been developed encapsulating apparatuses for enclosing seed-like materials with a polymeric gel as disclosed in Japanese Patent Applications laid Open No. 62-266137, and also No.63-197530. However, it has been a difficult problem to control the number of substances to be encapsulated, the diameter of a capsule, solidity of gel-coated layer and so on, as the substances are first scattered in a gelatinizing agent to be dropped in a curing agent in both cases.